skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh sure. In that case, go ahead and just substitute every occurrence of "average consumers" with "all consumers" in what I said above. Though I'd be over-generalizing it would still pretty much true.

I didn't say that just because a person is not a programmer that they are unable to think for themselves. A vast majority of people are completely out of the loop when it comes technology and have learned to rely on the judgement of others who are more informed when it comes to technology purchasing decisions. This isn't "mindless" or inability to think for themselves, in fact it's the smartest decision most people can make. We all do it when outside our fields of expertise.

There a ton of extremely competent people that are technologically clueless. To believe otherwise is bubble thinking.
I couldn't have said it better, myself! I do enjoy a bit of nostalgia, but my fondness for computer history is mostly about understanding how to build the future.
Ask HN: My fb fan page has over 700k likes, what should I do with it?
It's been pretty inactive for 2 years. What would you do with it? Anyone know what's within fb guidelines re: advertising, etc?
>Thousands of words about optimizing the reinvention of a wheel.

Without the "re-invention of wheel" we would still use stone wheels a la Flintstones or wooden carriage wheels. And without optimizing our wheels we would still have the 1920's version of rubber-made wheels.

>I thought we were hackers? We use libmysqlclient and stfu because we don't give a shit what language a client library is in because it WORKS and isn't unacceptably slow and LETS US SHIP.

And you "thought you were hackers"? That's not a hacker attitude, that's an enterprise code monkey attitude. I mean, we "use it because it's isn't unacceptably slow and it lets us ship"? WTF.

Hacking, in the purest sense, is not even about shipping at ALL. It's about the joy of tinkering and discovering and improving and optimizing.

It's not about shipping some stuff to the market with whatever happens to be available, and some "good enough" mentality.

>I really dislike this whole crowd and attitude.

It's called _Hacker_ News for a reason. Perhaps you were looking for "Building average shit with off the shelve components News".

I mean, _complaining about_ and writing that you _dislike_ a guy:

1) creating a free, open source, library useful to many

2)improving upon the status quo in MySQL driver libraries for Node

3) writing about it, to present his results, other's improvements, and useful tidbits he found?

It must take a very disturbing sense of reality, entitlement, and self-importance to do it.
> but Apple laptops only seem to excel on visual appeal (and this is a recent phenomenon - just look at the first PowerBook G4s). Design has to be functional, and this is where Apple always makes sacrifices.

I don't know what you are talking about--you are WAY overstating your case. My 11-inch MacBook Air is by the far the most ergonomic and pleasant-to-use laptop computer I have ever owned. The keyboard on it is by far the best laptop keyboard I have ever used, and the trackpad is revolutionarily wonderful compared to any other trackpad I have ever used.

That being said, I do prefer Thinkpad-style nubs to trackpads. Also, I find Thinkpads to be beautiful, not ugly. Also, I would agree that Apple does at times make unfortunate ergonomic decisions, like the lamentable and fortunately short-lived round mouse of a decade ago, and Apple's current laptop-style keyboard for desktop computers is a bit questionable. This doesn't bother me, personally, as I use a Kinesis keyboard anyway. Also, since Apple's laptop keyboards are so good, I think they actually might be better than most desktop keyboards anyway.

I don't find Apple to be any worse in the regard of form-over-function than another other company. The ergonomic improvements that they've brought in recent years far offset any ergonomic harm that they have done. One thing that Apple did get right with it's desktop keyboard is a return to small keyboards rather than the monstrosities that the industry has been foisting on us for the last few decades. The current small Apple keyboards remind me of "Happy Hacking" keyboards, which are the way that keyboards should be.
I have a ThinkPad (T420) too, I love it. I agree with everything that you said - nobody else comes close. Plus, their keyboards are by far the nicest laptop keyboards out there. The X220 is in my mind the perfect portable laptop... except, like every Lenovo laptop I've used, it has an absolutely terrible screen. It drives me nuts, because they come so close, and yet still miss by so much. I mean, I'm not expecting a Retina display here, but if Asus can put a 1920x1080 display on their $1000 Zenbooks, would it be too much to ask for Lenovo to put a 1600x900 panel on the X220?

My laptop - the T420 has a 1600x900 panel on it, but colors change at every angle, and I find myself constantly having to adjust it to get the angle just perfect. And even then, it's fuzzy.
Dear “API providers”, I don’t want to build an...
I thought that was a great idea but it broke scp when I tried it. Is there a way around that?
Well said. This matches my experience living for a long time in Germany (south and north), and interactions with French. I remember (from friends) the problems at DLR in Munich (German Aerospace Center) with senior French engineers trying to pull rank, which doesn't work in team-based German work culture.

Also, spot on with Anglo news coverage not really speaking for/ capturing the essence in continental Europe. E.g. current Anglo news criticizing northern European countries for 'austerity' measures (well, it's their money, so obviously they will not hand it out gladly).

It's an elusive topic with hardly any good information. Quite unusual to see such a balanced reply here.
Works on iOS? Too bad it's not allowed.
Fall back to pure chance games. Google Glasses won't help you win slots. (And should that become untrue, the slots can and will be fixed until it is true again.)
This is only true if you actually believe the expected payouts from these eyeball-based businesses could possibly be very high: many people do not, and the example companies we have to examine have not disproved this: unless you are actively in the position where people are trying to use your service to find things (Google), you apparently don't make money; maybe it is possible, but no one has figured out how to do it yet, and there was honestly not much reason to believe there would be beforehand. Now, maybe that analysis is wrong, and maybe there is tons of money to be made in these companies, or maybe they just need to be twice more as large as they are and it will work: that could totally be the case, and is then indicative of a set of morals and overall value mindset to chase that dream as opposed to another.
I've got a Geek Desk and I love it. Worth every penny.
Read a complete indepth review of Sidengo Website Builder
They aren't pricey, they just taste like crap.
That be pretty awesome imo
> If I understood the situation correctly, the builders cashed out quite nicely.

That is a very fair point. However, it is not always clear that the investors all did, and certainly not in the case of Facebook once it went public: a lot of people think that these companies are very well positioned to make tons of real revenue thanks to their large userbase (and, to be clear, I am not saying that they are "wrong": only that opinions differ, and there is some reason to believe that these opinions specifically differ in a general European mindset).
Cyber Gang to Wage Massive Wave of Trojan Attacks Against U.S. Banks
There's also Orbiter, which is probably even more realistic since its main goal is realistic space flight.
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
he's good because he's careful, he does the maths right, and he's doing meta-analysis, so he has more data than the people he's being compared to.

but he's popular mainly because he can communicate so well. doing the maths right is not that hard.
Maybe Apple is the new Microsoft, not Google? Maybe Apple does not have as many potential competitors i.e. virtually anyone selling ad space, to raise complaints?
Romney and G.O.P. Make Inroads in Silicon Valley
>Microsoft may have had a dominant share in the PC operating systems market, but I don't think they were ever a monopoly.

Thats the definition of a monopoly. At least in my language. (Dutch).. Dominant market share. Not all monopolies are bad, but any market with high margins and a single vendor with 90+% maketshare is a monopolistic market. Thats just how words and definitions work. Thats not an opinion.

Now here comes the opinion part: consumers had little to no choice. Why? Because the core functionality, is compatibility. Who would buy a car that you cant drive on the common road? I make the road analogy, because the difficult aspect of the OS market is that its infrastructure.

Imagine a world where cars, gas stations, oil supply and roads were completely unregulated except for the upholding of IP laws (in particular: patents) that enable certain types of incompatibilities to get legal protection. You are driving in a MS car, with special patent-protected tires, that only work on MS roads. They are also the only type of car allowed to drive on those roads. They have a special patent protected triangle shaped gas supply, that only MS fuel stations can resupply. Now, on this road you will only find exits to MS shopping malls, not those of competitors.

This could go on and on. Im not in the MS is evil boat, but market regulations in the IT are about 1% of what we actually need. And compared to traffic, snailmail, phone systems, electricity its extremely unregulated.

And maybe, if they are all truly forced to compete on quality, we would no longer have this "everything is broken and nobody seems to mind" problem. Because nobody minds, because it is not about getting customers: it is about how to hijack them. How to lock them in. And this is even more true for a connected world ... I cant just move a social life to another social network. I do not have the freedom to do that.

If we can not pick indiviually, we should be picking democratically. Or at the very least, regulate it all until there are enforced common fileformats, including application-containers, open communication exchanges and full data liberation. The only other alternative is complete exploitation by a monopolistic bully.
That is properly one of the most arrogant comments I have seen here recently.

Who the fuck are you to tell people how they get their enjoyment out of life?
Re-rasterizing and blitting the whole screen on every change is clearly unacceptable, but there's a large gap between that and outright HW acceleration. Being smarter about redraws gets you a long way. I have used things like web browsers on unaccelerated X11, and it's been totally usable even on ARM.
Completely right. A lot of social sites, notably Facebook do this when you for example post bit.ly links, so users are already groomed to accept it.

Then again, you could buy external captcha solving services and keep on trucking. :)
Chuckle. How many of those will go out and rob a liquor store? How many will perform an act of vandalism? How many will kill themselves because they are cut off from the only friends they've ever known?

While I can emphasize a bit (I used to play WoW, but "grew away from it" and now spend a large portion of my time in search and rescue and musical performance), I have to say that this is a very judgmental POV to take. You're seriously going to compare playing WoW to smoking? Even in the worst case, at least playing WoW is a step up from watching some inane TV show with no interaction. It's not like anybody suffers from second-hand MMORPG.

And you can always play moral superior: instead of reading a book, why don't they start their own company? Instead of going for a walk, why don't they run a marathon? Hell, I could see how someone could look down on the activities I choose ("why rescue idiots who got themselves into trouble? Let natural selection sort it out!" or "why perform music that's already been performed thousands of times before by better performers?"), but FFS, sometimes "wasting time" is some of the best time well spent.
FWIW, this was written in July of 2010 (2+ years ago) -- CouchDB is in a very different place now than it was then.

Reading the mailing lists of CouchDB, Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra are _very_ different experiences.

CouchDB's list reads like 10 or so of the same people discussing very high level efforts like documentation and Windows builds, developing the DB at a glacial pace -- including merging in changes from all the spin-off CouchDB efforts that all seem to be defunct now (e.g. BigCouch and the sharding code).

Tangentially, MongoDB/Redis/Cassandra mailing lists are NOTHING but "How do I..." questions, deployment questions, feature development questions, patch submissions, etc. (more-so Cassandra and MongoDB lists).

CouchDB to me has found this life that feels very academic to me which I think is a good thing in the long-term for the project. The principles are in no rush to get to features and have the motto "slow and consistent wins the race". I would be surprised at all if a few years go by and then CouchDB gets rediscovered suddenly as the panacea to everything (something akin to how Jetty suddenly became hot business in the Java server world after being mostly ignored for 10 years)

With the money behind Cassandra and Mongo it is probably not much of a surprise that there are much more new deployments going on and Redis has found a place somewhere between the two with what I would say is a Linus-like steward at the helm (props to Salvatorefor being everything that is right with open-source)

I wouldn't build a commercial product on CouchDB tomorrow, but I am eagerly waiting to see where it goes in the next year. It is wonderfully designed, but I'd like to see some of the nagging "table stakes" issues like replication failures fixed before caring about Feature XYZ and release 2.0
Thanks, but I did it ironically.
Yeah, "one of these things is not like the other" really doesn't make any sense if you think about it when there are only two "things".

Either both of them are not like the other, or both of them are like the other.
I agree, that is probably what he meant, but it was factually incorrect.

Even so, in eve there are only small aspects that span servers simultaneously (the market place, and maybe other things too--I haven't played in a year or so).

The unique thing about eve is being able to jump between "realms" or servers or "shards." That gives the illusion of playing together in a much larger world.

I've never played WoW, so I don't know if you can jump between shards or realms, or if they are treated more like parallel dimensions.
Ask HN: community-based alternative Twitter API
Here's an idea to get around Twitter's admittedly crap api: people install a bookmarklet, browser extension etc. that detects when you are reading Twitter, and extracts the tweets from the DOM and sends them to a server. If enough people use it then you can start to build up a relatively good alternative to Twitter's unreliable and heavily rate-limited API. Does anyone know if this would work effectively, and more importantly would it breach Twitter's TOS?
Fix Your Timestep - Synchronizing game physics
I first saw a Microsoft store at the Stanford Shopping Center (Palo Alto, CA), right next to the Apple store. At Valley Fair (Santa Clara, CA), I noticed a Microsoft store and my friend commented how it looked like an Apple store. I looked around and sure enough there was an Apple store 30 feet away. Microsoft isn't trying to be subtle at all, which seems to support your theory.
The answer to that when one wants both coffee and tea is "yes" rather than "no".
Recreating remote views for iOS 5
This is pretty fun to play around with, if a bit difficult to navigate- I kept flying all over the place when trying to look at a particular episode in the initial view. Amazing work anyway, and as a (heavy) Lostpedia contributor (around the season 3 days) it's nice to see the data being used in interesting ways.
On the other end of the spectrum, I thought the presentation was impressive. I have a typical broadband connection, and I thought it worked just fine. The loading time seemed instantaneous.

I actually appreciate that modern websites are increasingly being designed for higher standards of internet bandwidth/connectivity. It's not that I think bandwidth isn't precious, but when websites can deliver beautiful content at the cost of an extra 10th of a second of loading time on a modern connection, I think it's worth it.

A four minute download time on your part implies you have some kind of dial-up connection, is there a reason why you haven't upgraded to a faster service?
Holy crap. I was thinking about this very idea a few hours ago. You didnt happen to be listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe when this idea came up, did you?
> No, seriously. There is one iPad, not the new one and the old one.

Not what I see on the Apple website. iPad 2, non-retina, but still a damn good tablet for $400 and the new iPad. Add in a 7" option, and that's a good selection.
don't forget: treating UE and the Euro(€)-using subset of it (euroland) as if they are one.
lol, "This webpage is not available"
Thank you, AncientPC. I have adjusted the article with the insight you and many others have provided me.
"Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.” - Alan Kay

I find this quote to be surprisingly true. It boggles the mind to think that mundane stuff such as sewing machines once was high technology, but there you go. My grandmother still remembers the marvel the day she got her first sewing machine.
"Predictions are hard—especially about the future."

And here I was under the impression that ALL predictions are about the future.
Yep, looks like he stopped doing inline (on-page?) references to sources past slide 13. The last page has a collection of sources, but no direct connection to the statements in the slides.

Edit: In the comments on the post there's a bit more information, not sure if the slides were ever updated:

Danc September 28, 2008 10:30 PM

Appreciate the comments on the data. I'll update this presentation so that the data sources are more clearly presented. Currently, many (though not all) of the numbers are in the reference articles (but that seems to be hard to parse)
I used to use n before I found out about nvm[1]. I used to have issues installing Node.js packages with n, but so far nvm just works.

The best advantage of nvm is that I can easily install global packages without being the root user, because it installs your Node.js files in a per-user ~/nvm/ folder (this is customizable to whatever folder you choose).

[1] https://github.com/creationix/nvm
It comes not from arrogance but from an apparent difference in how you perceive addictive video games: harmless entertainment, or harmful addictive substances? I'm not going to put my chips down here, but the point is the original poster sees WoW on par with cigarettes and I think even many smokers themselves would wish they didn't get "enjoyment" out of smoking, but are trapped in an addiction.
As far as roulette goes, I believe that casinos changed the rules a long time ago to require that the bets be placed before the ball is released, after a group of UC Santa Cruz physics postgrads in the late '70s, early '80s built a wearable computer that would predict which octant the ball was going to end up in well enough to give a 44% advantage over the house. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons

What you could still do, though, is use the computer to look for biases in the wheel. Roulette wheels do not produce uniformly distributed results, and with enough data you can find bets that give you an advantage.

This was covered in an episode of the wonderful TV series Breaking Vegas ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Vegas ). Each episode of that series focused on one person or group that found a way to beat the house. Some cheated (bribe the dealer, hack the slot machine software, sleight of hand to alter bets after the outcome is determined), some develop amazing physical skill ("dice dominators" can throw dice with such precise control over the initial conditions that they come up with the same outcome each time), one guy counterfeited casino tokens (and did such a good job that the chip manufacturer was not able to tell which tokens were his and which were theirs--they only knew counterfeit tokens existed because more tokens were coming back when they emptied the slot machines than they had issued), and some (such as the roulette bias people) exploit the math of the game.

In the episode that dealt with roulette biases, there was a family in Europe that would observe a wheel for a very large number of plays, taking notes on the outcomes. The casinos do not object to note taking--they encourage it, because people taking notes are people who think they have a system, and 99.99% of the time people who think they have a system are people who do not understand the laws of probability and are going to lose. Well, this family is not part of the 99.99%. They took their notes, found the favored numbers, and bet on those, and won big.

The casinos tried moving the wheels between tables, but the family members had spent so much time looking at the wheels gathering data, they could recognize the wheels from wear patterns, scratches, and so on, and so still place the right bets.

The casinos then simply banned them. If they had been playing in Las Vegas, that would have been the end of it, but they were in Europe. They went to court--and the court said casinos could not ban people for simply winning too much. The family had not violated any legitimate casino rules, so the casinos had to let them back in.

I don't remember how the casinos finally stopped these people--probably by replacing wheels with ones the family had not seen, or physically altering the wheels to change the distribution.
Please leave politics to other web sites, thank you.
Today's the day you learn about Yogiisms.
Oh, yup, that's irritating too. Do they not know about the UK (GBP)? Sweden (SEK)? Denmark (DKK)? Poland (PLN)? Czech Republic (CZK)? etc.